Under a Vaulted Sky

Pauline Rowan worked closely with a small community of people documenting their relationship to a deconsecrated Irish convent and its abandoned gardens, all of which were marked for demolition. Her collaborators consisted of the convents’ transient residents, its previously evicted nuns, and her mother who was raised in a convent. The exhibition looks at our relationship to home, primarily the garden, and the cultural repetition of our need to control land. Under a Vaulted Sky further reflects on the history of women in Ireland through a personal family narrative.

This long-term project also considers the struggle and acceptance of those people involved, all knowing that their home and sanctuary would be soon destroyed. As a consequence, a long-standing, ancient link of this site with nature, worship and propagation was severed. An extensive body of work, Under a Vaulted Sky consists of portraits, still lives, field documentary, and is intertwined with the artist's own performative responses. This project has been created at an important time in Irish history, when the country is separating itself from catholic religion and redefining its relationship to spirituality. While this system falls apart, the remnants of a pagan past can be seen emerging.

"There is something utterly bewitching about the way inside and outside collide in Rowan’s photographs. In one image, an arched church recess has become subsumed by rocks and dirt, and a cavernous hole in the wall is flanked by an intricate old floral mural. In another, the artist herself lies across a table and holds a branch at her stomach, as if it is a root growing from within her. Outside, statues have been left to decay and bleed blue onto their stones, while man-made fences are beginning to encroach into the space. Apples and statues, trees and breeze blocks, women and acts of worship – a whole constellation of signs and symbols, past and present, tumble together here." — Joanna Creswell, Lens Culture

"By fusing botanical and religious imagery, Under a Vaulted Sky suggests women’s bodies as just another space another outpost of patriarchy in general and Catholicism in particular...Women’s bodies are simply another thing to be measured and controlled. Life-giving, but by virtue of this quality, also threatening and in need of being curtailed. In its quiet documentation of a convent being slowly taken apart, Rowan’s series critiques the reality as given by Catholic dogma — in effect, by pointing to the artificial nature of the vaulted “sky” above, which has only ever served for the deleterious treatment of all that is capable of producing life, here on Earth." — Rebecca O’ Dwyer, Irish Photo Network